Patrick Heron by Andrew Wilson

Author:Andrew Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

Big Purple Garden Painting :

July 1983 – June 1984

208.3 × 335.3

It was not just the landscape and plants of home that found their way into Heron’s late paintings, however. In 1989 he was invited by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to spend a month’s residency in Sydney (which he managed to extend to four incredibly prolific months), his third visit to Australia. As he walked through the Botanic Garden en route to his studio after breakfast each day, Heron’s senses were bombarded by the light, colours and vegetation of his new surroundings. In response, he made six large oils and forty-six gouaches. Known as the Sydney Garden Paintings, these works have an even greater openness, with more expanses of white, and an increased emphasis on the linear in all its manifestations, than the paintings made before this trip. Sydney Garden Painting : January : 1990 : I (p.72) encapsulates an experience of a landscape with a rhythmic structure very different to that of Zennor. Made in the middle of the antipodean summer with Australian paints, it is composed almost exclusively of vertical strokes, horizontal bands and rings of colour, with just the merest suggestion of pale mauve leaves at its centre. These ‘topographical abstractions’19 were yet another shift for an artist who later stated that there were no lines in the natural world.20 Heron’s lines are not intended to be illustrative: instead, they are a compositional device recalling the graphic complexity that underlies his figurative paintings of the 1950s such as Christmas Eve : 1951 (pp.36–7). By the time of a painting like 13 March : 1992 (p.70), not only had Heron stripped his titles of any allusion, limiting them to the date of production, but the role of line or calligraphy had become markedly more pronounced. In fact, this painting is composed almost exclusively of lines in different colours and thicknesses of paint on a white ground. Where does painting end and drawing begin in these works? This question is best answered by Heron himself: he greatly admired the calligraphic expression of Henri Matisse’s brushstrokes21 and in relation to his own mark-making on canvas said ‘there isn’t anything in painting anywhere that is not drawing’.22

In an essay for the Barbican exhibition catalogue, Alan Gouk remarked that the more relaxed style of the artist’s 1980s paintings resulted in ‘greater diversity of incident, variety of type of silhouette and textual variety, than at any time in Heron’s previous work’.23 Ironically, this looser, lighter, brush-scribbled series was, in Heron’s words ‘painfully born’,24 much like Matisse’s sun-drenched Vence interiors of the late 1940s that belie the creative struggle that lay behind them.25

The palpable sense of liberation and delight evident in Heron’s late work led one critic, writing about his 1994 exhibition Big Paintings at London’s Camden Arts Centre, to comment on the well-established ‘syndrome’ of late paintings, when a successful artist, arguably with nothing left to prove, is free to experiment without constraint.26 Certainly the eleven canvases in that exhibition, Heron’s

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